Lucia came down. Her face was beautiful with big, glowing, dark eyes. Her black hair was combed close to the head. She was as quiet as ever, but full of life. I liked her immediately.
I had no idea whether or not to wish the Hathaways a Happy New Year. Do you give salutations to people in mourning? We escaped down the front steps. I was surprised that they had been so warm and so eager to share Bullock’s shrine with me as one of his companions. I could never escape the feeling, when I was among the faded aristocracy of the Midwest, that I was an alien Jew. But when I was with the upper crust of Chicago Jewry, I felt equally alienated.
I wondered how to treat Lucia. I felt my being alive was an insult to her dead brother whom she had loved so much. I could not talk about Bullock with her. It was as if I were afraid he would punish me from the grave through her.
At our favorite bar, the Tin Pan Alley on Rush Street, we toasted the New Year. Lucia, Ben, and I did not have much to say to each other. We just drank and tried to be funny. Finally, we took Lucia home, and Ben and I continued on alone.
A feeling of belligerence began growing in me when I returned to Chicago just a day or so earlier. Civilians seemed hostile. The war was over and they were tired of soldiers. But I still hadn’t been discharged and I had to stay in uniform. I felt surrounded by enemies in every bar. I wanted to explode. With Ben at my side I could walk down the street and snarl because he was at my side. No civilian could cast aspersions on him because he had been so badly wounded.
Now, at the end of the night, I felt weak. The fury had drained out of me. I was angry at being back in my father’s house, at being in the military, at not having a girl, at being an inferior being. But now I was finished for the night. Happy new year, soldier. Welcome home.
6
Joan Mitchell: The Beginning
Soon after my return from China, I again dropped into my favorite bar, Tin Pan Alley. Huddled in one corner, playing wonderfully, were the blind pianist and singer Laura Rucker and a great old jazz drummer named Baby Dodds (whose memoir of coming up the river from New Orleans I would later publish in the first Evergreen Review). At the end of the narrow bar there was a staircase, and that night I saw this attractive girl walking down the stairs from the ladies’ room.
She was Joan Mitchell. The moment I saw her I knew I was going to marry her. I knew immediately that she was the one who could choke off any flames that might still be flickering for Nancy. All I remember is that I went up and I spoke to her and that was it. A few days later, I started asking her out.
I had known Joan in high school but had paid little attention to her at the time because I was a few years older and very infatuated with Nancy. Still, I admired Joan, followed her skating career, and was aware she was a painter. I didn’t really know her well, but she was always there in the background. When she was in the tenth grade, I took her to see Citizen Kane. I also tried to make her more receptive to radical political ideas.
Joan was a great athlete, and she was pushed by her mother to become a figure skater. Although she did not have the grace and agility of a ballerina, she did become one of the two or three best young skaters in the country and spent many hours practicing at Lake Placid, New York. This took her away from Parker a good deal, which aggravated the school’s faculty tremendously.
In fact, almost none of the teachers at Parker liked Joan because she was definitely difficult. She was very abrasive towards the teachers, openly critical. When she did happen to be around, Joan was an instigator of trouble. The Parker teachers wanted to throw her out. Fortunately there was an art teacher who thought Joan was a marvelous art student. He recognized her talent. He stood up for her, protesting vehemently. He won out, and she stayed. Alfred Adler, our foreign language and psychology teacher at Parker, later recalled, “She became a very different kind of person after she left Parker for college, more likeable, more sociable.”
Joan’s family lived two blocks from where my family ultimately lived. Both of our parallel streets dead-ended a block north on North Avenue. Between us lay the elegant and grandiose home of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. Her family lived in an apartment with a view of Lake Michigan. “I carry it around with me,” she said later, and her paintings are full of water—water by turns calm and chaotic, like her life.
The Mitchells were a wealthy and well-known family. Joan’s mother, Marion Strobel, was the daughter of Charles Louis Strobel, a major architectural force and, along with Louis Sullivan and others, a pioneer in the use of steel in building construction, which made it possible for the new generation of world-famous architects just coming into their own in Chicago in the 1890s to use steel and stone in combination, now a common practice in modern architecture. His work was crucial to the construction of Chicago Stadium, which lasted many years and was the only stadium in Chicago.
Marion Strobel was involved in so-called high-society, and at the same time she was an esteemed poet and an editor of Poetry magazine as well as a close coworker of Poetry’s founder, Harriet Monroe. She knew many important writers and poets, from William Carlos Williams, who wrote a poem for her, to Karl Shapiro, who later, at her insistence, was the editor of Poetry for a period of time. The fact that he was Jewish impressed me. Karl also wrote the introduction to Tropic of Cancer. Another editor of Poetry was William Jay Smith, who was of American Indian heritage. Like Shapiro, he became a friend of mine. He introduced me to Jean Genet and Grove would later publish the selected writings of Jules Laforgue which he edited.
Joan’s father, James Herbert Mitchell, was a dermatologist from a small town in Illinois, and he had become quite famous in the Chicago area. He had high connections in the Presbyterian Hospital, then the fanciest in Chicago. (He treated Al Capone for syphilis.) Eccentric and cranky, he was a very nasty person in many ways. Joan told me that he kept bottles of gin in with her underwear and was constantly slugging from them on the sly. Still, she spent a lot of time with her father, who took her to the Art Institute from an early age and painted watercolors with her. He was cold, and as demanding and competitive as her mother, who I always felt did not like me because I was Jewish and therefore persona non grata.
In 1942, at sixteen, Joan entered Smith College. She left after two years to study full time at the Art Institute of Chicago. She spent the summers of 1945 and 1946 in Guanajuato, Mexico. In Mexico she met the painters David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. You can see their influence in her painting at that time. I went to Mexico in 1946 and drove her back home, speeding down hot, two-lane highways. We stopped at grungy motels and dim cantinas, then crossed the border and pushed north through the lushness of the American Midwest.
My love for Joan was not like my love for Nancy Ashenhurst. I did not have the same mad, wild longing for her. But Joan was an exciting and talented artist, sexually sophisticated, an achiever, and someone I wanted to make my life with. New York was where we had to be. Joan wanted to study Abstract Expressionism with Hans Hofmann (she would attend one class with him and never go back). And I wanted to go into films. So I moved to New York in January 1947.
My sad, beautiful childhood friend Teru Osato had been diagnosed with cancer, which was to bring on her death within not too many weeks. She asked if I would like to take her apartment in Brooklyn by the East River, next to the Brooklyn Bridge. I agreed immediately and asked Joan to move from Chicago and live with me when she finished her term at the Art Institute. She said yes. I don’t know how shocked her parents were by anything she did. She had always been a free spirit.
(From Chicago, Joan to Barney)
February 10, 1947
I love you and your drawings and your letters […]
I started a tremendous painting because life was so wonderful too and I dreamt about you all night and found it difficult to sleep—(the pillow kind where it almost became you and then is only a pillow) and I kept remembering the Saturday I spent at 1540 similarly half awake only you weren’t a pillow and the fucking, oddly enough, I re
member only as a side line—I miss you terribly—much more than 2 weeks & 3 days worth and at times I feel turned inside out and there are no substitutes at all for Barney—the rank and file has nothing to offer in this case […]
Why do you mean so God damn much to me—not why but what in the hell am I doing away from you […]
Of course I’ll be your Valentine—it was a nice Valentine—but none of this one-sided stuff—you have to be mine […] I want to be really happy—I’m sick of missing you—write me more—draw me more pitchas [sic] and be my Valentine.
In June of 1947, Joan graduated from the Art Institute and was awarded one of its traveling fellowships. She was planning on going to Paris, but postponed the trip until the following year and settled into the Brooklyn apartment with me. Helped by Francine Felsenthal, a friend from the Art Institute, she took the station wagon I had borrowed from a filmmaker and moved all of her belongings to Brooklyn.
In New York, her painting would develop toward Abstract Expressionism, inspired in part by the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Arshile Gorky, later by the work of Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Jackson Pollock. She spent most of her time visiting galleries and museums, notably the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). She was also caught up with me in the production of the film I would go on to make, Strange Victory.11
The following June of 1948, Joan left for Paris, sailing from New York on a Liberty ship, the S. S. Ernie Pyle—a ten-day voyage. Staying with friends, the artists Zuka Omalev and Louis Mittelberg, she explored the city until she found a studio on the Rue Galande in the fifth arrondisement. The small Left-Bank atelier overlooked the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre and Notre Dame, on the other side of the Seine.
(From Paris, Joan to Barney)
July 5, 1948
Schmuckie darling—
Je suis ici and very confused—very lonely—very lost—and lots & lots of french poodles—all sizes— […]
My room is tiny but beautiful—Tomorrow I look for a studio—I’m exhausted—didn’t go to bed last night—went to a party or rather a “salon” […]
it’s all so confusing—but two beautiful letters from you—write me there for a while (To me)—I live in Montmartre—right Bank—surrounded by black market Arabs— …
Your letters—what can I say—I love you—I miss you—and maybe I’m just homesick or maybe I’ve just never been in this position before and maybe it’s good—maybe too it’s difficult to bridge gaps with people and maybe I’m not so dumb as I feel—but one doesn’t go around here with an inferiority complex or any complex at all I guess and one isn’t an American if one can help it— […]
I must learn French quickly—I must start painting—I mustn’t feel so damn inadequate— […]
I think tomorrow it will all be filled with moons & stars—I think it must be only first day displaced depression—there’s much that’s like Mexico here— & Havre was the first reality of war I had seen—horrible in the dawn […]
It’s tomorrow night—that is Saturday and today was better—in fact Paris is beautiful—I saw all the things one is supposed to see— […]
God—no one knows Orozco or Kollwitz or Posada […] —they know Klee sort of—Paris is provincial in a way I guess— […]
Chauvinism here is very subtle but there is much—subtle in the sense that one is expected to be a female woman—as well as the pants & smoking in the street things—and strangely enough here you think of N. Y. as the center of art—everything modern really is there plus things like Kepys butter & American coffee are essential—the people are so poor—I didn’t expect it—where are you—I love you so much—and I think it’s worse being here without you than in New York—It’s not a city to be alone in—I suppose I must be strong like all these other people—but fuck—I hate seeing Zuka & Louis together—I hate going to bed alone—and here too I walk along the street with my puss in the air looking at the studios (whole blocks of them) and wishing we lived in one— […]
Miss me un peu—I can’t imagine loving anyone else—ever—& my love to your ear—
Juana
(From Paris, Joan to Barney)
July 9, 1948
Darling Schmuckie
Christ how I’m missink [sic] you—really—at times life at 1 Fulton St seems like a dream—Gluton [our cat]—you & the bridge—it doesn’t seem real—like it happened—and anyway you make up your impression of a place starting with the person you love and building around it. How was Nancy—J’ai peur de cette fille—tu comprende—you fucked—no you necked—well a little—no no—which makes me think of Gale—of N.Y.—of you—when please will S.V.
[Strange Victory] be finished—you must have seen the first print by this time—good?—of course—what I’m asking is when will you be here—I’m lonely—and writing you makes me think of it more and I don’t want to think of it more because I don’t know why I came in the first place and I haven’t all this Promethean strength one is supposed to have and I don’t know what to paint next week because I guess I’ll begin then and there are no bridges and God I wish you were lying against me now, warm (it’s about 45˚ here)—just being real. Really Barney I don’t feel whole without you, something’s gone and I keep looking up and down the streets for it—what have I done—lots & little I guess besides rereading your letters at every other café… I didn’t get in the Momentum show which doesn’t surprise me.
Maybe the paintings weren’t finished enough. I don’t know— sometimes I’m no longer sure if I can paint […]
Right now I’m cold—where are you Schmuckie—why can’t I write you what I’m thinking. I think so much of the war when I’m not thinking of you—of people with courage & no stockings, of the collaborators that are all over now, of the confusion […] Sometimes I think something will happen to you and I get frightened—sometimes I think I’ll wake up and find you and feel you—and make eggs & bacon & English muffins—and then I think I’m spoiled—but really spoiled and feel guilty—but still the reason for things is gone when I remember that there’s nothing to come home for and no one to take a bath for and no one to be bitchy in the morning for. Bring blankets. And how is Sager [Dr. Clifford Sager, my psychoanalyst for many years] & Gluton and the other gulton—soft & sleeping among the holes in blue shorts—
I love you darling—& don’t be depressed like you sound—just finish the thing and come quickly and we’ll go swim in a blue sea—& fuck on yellow sand—without your letters I’d go crazy—bush is crying—J.
I went to see Joan in Paris for the month of August 1948. I took my new Jeep station wagon with me on the plane, loaded after an all-day nightmare. Then it was back to New York to get Strange Victory on its rocky road to an opening.
Another period seemed to end. I had wound up my film, and there was a new life with Joan, America was heading into a war in Asia, and a blanket of suspicion hovered over the country as the Cold War slammed down a barrier between the Soviet Union and the United States. Anyone with a radical background was threatened with exposure and persecution. It was a good time to get out. At the end of the year I would follow Joan to Europe.
7
Partings and Beginnings: Joan, the Hamptons, and Early Grove
In Paris, after Joan and I returned from a miserable trip to Prague, where we went to sell the rights to Strange Victory at the end of 1948, I watched Joan’s paintings become more abstract and more violent. She was doing good work in abominable conditions. Our studio was freezing. It was impossible to heat. We both had colds and later Joan developed bronchitis. Paris in summer was delightful, full of sunlight and flower and leaf; in winter it was like a dreary gray cell with a view. The only warmth came from Joan’s paintings: views of the river, the bridges, figures, and interiors of the studio. Still, our days were punctuated by coughs.
Finally Joan’s bronchitis was serious enough that I took her to the American Hospital in Paris. The doctor advised that she
move south. I was delighted. We packed up. I knew where we were going—straight to Provence, a place called Le Lavandou, where we sublet a villa from our friends Sidney and Joan Simon.
There was time for a trip to Spain in the spring of 1949, where, at my absolute insistence, we visited Guernica, the setting for Picasso’s great painting. We were depressed by the condition of the country under Franco even though we had expected it. The Guardia Civil was everywhere, along with ragged peasants, aging prostitutes, child delinquents, and gorgeously dressed members of high society. I had been too young to join the Spanish Loyalists in their defense of Madrid in 1939 but now I was able to offer up feelings of adoration for those like Ernest Hemingway and Paul Robeson, who had joined, and above all, my greatest love and grief for my most revered heroes, the International Brigade.
We stayed almost half the year at Le Lavandou. Joan was painting nonstop, moving into her own space, increasing the size and brilliance of her work. By the end of that time, we decided to get married and return to America. Soon after our wedding in Le Lavandou on September 10, 1949, we sailed for New York. The long stay in France had been an important transition for us both.
In New York we went straight from the ship to the Chelsea Hotel, where we stayed while looking for a place to live. The Chelsea was a beautiful building on the outskirts of nowhere—West Twenty-third Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues—and had been and was still the place for poets, composers, and artists of all kinds to live, congregate, and express themselves.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 8